Who Made the Most Significant Contribution to Fight Against Infectious Diseases; Edward Jenner, Louis Pasteur or Robert Koch?

In this essay I am going to discuss all three of the people mentioned above but I will also show you who I believe is the most influential and why I believe this. These people changed our medical knowledge forever and will always be remembered for this. Firstly there was Edward Jenner, he was born in 1749 and died in 1823, however in his 17 years he made one of the greatest discoveries in medical history. He had heard an old wives tale about milkmaids not contracting smallpox, which was a deadly disease killing thousands of people. He then believed that he should look into this and see if there was any truth in the story. He experimented on a little boy by injecting him with cowpox –something that only milkmaids caught- then with smallpox, when the boy didn’t become seriously ill with smallpox he knew that cowpox had made him immune to smallpox thus creating the first vaccination in the world. Secondly was Louis Pasteur, who was born in 1822 and died in 1895, was a French man that started as a chemist. Even though he was only a chemist he was hired by different companies, such as the wine industry, to investigate why some wine went sour while being made. This forced Pasteur to look down a microscope at the germs affecting it and he found something extremely revolutionary. People at this time still believe in miasma, which is where people believe that disease was caused by bad smells and that disease caused germ the other way around. Through Pasteur’s research he discovered that this was not true and that it was in fact germs that caused disease. Through his wine research he also found that if you heat up a mixture then you could kill the germs that were in the liquid. This process was the first of its kind and was even named after him; we know it today as pasteurisation. He also suggested that this should be used on surgical tools but he was unfortunately ignored. Along with everything mentioned above he also created vaccinations for chicken pox, cholera,...